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The EU is supposed to grow again, but there is still some disagreement about how. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is sticking to his proposal for an associate EU membership status for Ukraine, Moldova and the Western Balkan countries, namely Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia.
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Critics complain that this would be a “waiting room” or a form of second-class membership. Gunther Krichbaum counters that they have apparently not yet understood the model.
For the Minister of State for Europe at the Federal Foreign Office, this is about a clear commitment. He explains: “Why should we not give these countries, which would then have the status of associated members, albeit without voting rights, the opportunity to take part in meetings of the European Parliament? It does not cost us a single euro or cent.”
According to Krichbaum, it would also send a clear signal to China, Russia and other countries, showing: “These countries belong with us, to the European Union.”
This, he says, would make accession candidates feel that they are already to some extent “part of the club”. It is important to draw these states closer and integrate them.
“New tiered system” for EU enlargement
This puts him in line with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, who at the EU–Western Balkans summit in Montenegro in early June also called for the process to be speeded up.
Krichbaum too is calling for more pace, but he believes now is also the right moment to think critically about the method of accession.
He no longer thinks much of the current model: “We organise accession procedures like a kind of high jump competition. The bar is set at 1.50 metres, that is the so‑called acquis communautaire, all the legal rules, the entire body of EU law at 1.50 metres, and the countries are supposed to clear it. In reality, this acquis communautaire is no longer at 1.50 metres, but at 2.10 metres, because over the past ten, twenty years all the legal rules have been tightened and new regulations have been added.”
By way of explanation: the so‑called acquis communautaire refers to the entire body of law of the European Union – all the valid legislation, rules and obligations that an acceding country has to adopt in full.
According to Krichbaum, many new rules have been added, for instance on consumer and environmental protection. The whole framework is no longer comparable with earlier standards. Yet even 1.50 metres was already a major challenge for accession candidates. For him one thing is clear: “We have to move away from this high jump competition.”
He is proposing a kind of staircase or tiered system, stressing that it would in no way be a dead end: the “final destination, the terminus, is and will remain full membership of the European Union.”
But what about the cost of EU enlargement? Can the EU’s net contributors still shoulder it? Krichbaum believes they can, as everything happens within the existing budget and former recipient countries have now become donors.
Today’s Poland, for example, is nothing like the country it was at the time of EU accession. “The Polish economy is booming,” says Krichbaum.
That is not the case in all European countries. Germany’s growth forecast for 2026, for instance, is subdued. This naturally has an impact on its relationship with Brussels. Krichbaum stresses that room for manoeuvre is limited. The EU member states will feel this in the still highly complex negotiations on the multiannual financial framework for 2028–2034.
New priorities for the future EU budget
In fact, the countries already in the “EU club” are currently preoccupied with the next EU budget. The European Commission has put forward a spending ceiling of 1.7 trillion euros over seven years, Krichbaum explains. Berlin is calling for a drastic cut of 400 billion euros.
For Krichbaum, the key issue is how the money is distributed: where should the priorities lie?
He is calling for a rethink, or rather a fresh start: “If we were reinventing the European Union today and, theoretically, had a reset button we could press, we would not start with agricultural policy. Without any doubt, that was the right decision in the second half of the last century. But today the focus is on issues such as security, defence, cyber security, but also of course space, artificial intelligence and competitiveness. These are all areas from which we expect to generate our prosperity in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years’ time.”
He argues for a different set of priorities and suggests merging cohesion policy and agricultural policy into a single heading, into one pillar, as it were.
It would then be up to the member states to decide how to allocate funding within it. Agriculture would remain important, but the focus would also have to shift to other fields.
Here too, as with EU enlargement, speed is of the essence. Krichbaum hopes an agreement on the new EU budget can be reached before the end of the year.
He adds: “I hope so for many reasons, because we may still be able to forecast what will happen in the remainder of this year, 2026. But I cannot predict everything that will happen in 2027. And then reaching agreement could become even harder. In other words, it is already complicated enough. I believe we have a strong interest in having the negotiations on the multiannual financial framework truly wrapped up by the end of this year.”
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